This paper contributes to the emerging ‘historic turn’ in organizational analysis identified by Booth & Rowlinson (2006) by developing an historicised account of Knowledge-Intensive Organizations (KIOs). In a way parallel to McGrath’s (2005) study of early medieval Irish monastic communities as KIOs, we provide a study of Bletchley Park (BP), the WW2 codebreaking centre. In particular, we argue...

This paper points to the poor state of empirical measures of the quality of states, that is, executive branches and their bureaucracies. Much of the problem is conceptual, since there is very little agreement on what constitutes high-quality government. The paper suggests four approaches: (1) procedural measures, such as the Weberian criteria of bureaucratic modernity; (2) capacity measures, wh...

This article introduces a new concept to the study of decentralization processes: policy dynamism. At its core is the notion that the sequential and temporal process of health decentralization affect the nature of intergovernmental relationships and municipal bureaucratic capacity. Examining the case of Brazil, I argue that the rush to decentralize health services to municipalities has, in the ...

Normal bureaucracy tends to centralise, standardise and simplify, serve better those people places that are less poor more accessible. Field bureaucracies have done well (a) where simple standardised programmes found uniform conditions – like the human body with smallpox yaws eradication campaigns, or irrigated plains green revolution packages, (b) they created sustained conditions, as technica...

Public agency managers certainly believe that the structures and rules that politicians provide influence their policy decisions. Many public administration scholars share that belief, but convincing empirical evidence is in short supply, partly because it is difficult to find agencies that make similar policy decisions, but are structured in different ways, creating the conditions for a “quasi...

Bureaucracy is characrerised by rules, specific sphere of competence, hierarchy, specia iized rraining, separarion from means of production or administrarion and the recording in writing. The NHS is nor a rypicai bureaucratic organizarion, but ir has some of irs characteris tics. The alternative modeis (democraric, matrix-type structure) do nor seem to respond to the need for change. Ir is sugj...

http://ccn.aacnjournals.org want it, but truthfully I’m not sure what it is . . . not having to follow bureaucratic rules and chain of command? . . . Autonomy is making decisions—not always having to ask? Autonomy must have something to do with bureaucracy and size because many nurses in this hospital said that as we merged and got bigger, we lost our autonomy. In 2001, staff nurses in 14 magne...

This article views the bureaucratic form of organization as both an agent and an expression of key modern social innovations that are most clearly manifested in the non-inclusive terms by which individuals are involved in organizations. Modern human involvement in organizations epitomizes and institutionally embeds the crucial yet often overlooked cultural orientation of modernity whereby human...